The Ploy

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Get all Empires to 5.0, aka "The Ploy"

High Faction Standing with all 4 Empires, Amarr, Caldari, Gallente and Minmatar, is desirable because it:

• Gives access to all 7 Epic Arcs
• Lets you do Level 4 Missions for any Empire Corporation
• Lowers Broker Fees in all major Trading Hubs

Getting to 5.00 Faction Standing is tedious and time consuming rather then difficult.

You will need

Train skills:

• Social to gain more Standing from each Mission; level V makes getting Standing a lot easier then level IV. Following plan assumes Standings trained to V.
• Connections to decrease how much Unmodified Standing you need; level V increase your 3.8 Unmodified Standing to 5.0 Effective Standing

Early in your capsuleer adventures:

• Avoid accepting Missions against an Empire; the Gallente will want you to fight the Caldari: decline it
• Complete the Career Agent Missions no more then once as you'll need the other two sets later
• Pick your favorite Empire and increase their Standing first
• Run Missions for as few Corporations in each Empire as possible

Tips for getting the sum of 20.0 Empire Standing:

• Do Level 4 Security Missions; blitz them with other pilots to speed up their completion
• Every 16th completed Mission you will be sent a Storyline Mission
• Sisters of EVE Epic Arc The Blood Stained Stars increases your Standing by 7% towards an Empire of your choice

How it works

Derived Empire Standing modifiers

Standing	Amarr	Caldari	Gallente	Minmatar
Amarr	1.0	0.7	-0.2	-0.5
Caldari	0.5	1.0	-0.5	-2.0
Gallente	-0.2	-0.5	1.0	8.0
Minmatar	-0.5	-0.2	0.8	1.0

Amarr fight Minmatar and Caldari fight Gallente.

Storyline Missions will start decreasing your total sum of Empire Standings. This is because negative Derived Standing will become greater then positive Effective Standing gain.

Standings gain mechanics

When standings go up or down they do so as a percentage; this is always a percentage decay towards the extreme end of the scale. For example, if someone has 1.0 standing with an NPC corporation and completes a mission that changes standing by +5%, then the current standing is increased by 5% of the difference from 1 to 10; that's a change of +0.45 with an end result of 1.45. However, if someone else with a 4.0 standing completes the same mission under the same circumstances and also gets a 5% increase, then that's 5% of the difference from 4 to 10; that's a change of +0.30 with an end result of 4.30.

If something causes a standing decrease, then it's a percentage decay towards −10. For example, if someone with 1.0 standing suffers a −5% change, then that's 5% of the difference from 1 to −10; that's a change of −0.55 with an end result of 0.45. If someone with 4.0 standing suffers that same −5% change, then it's 5% of the difference from 4 to −10; that's a change of −0.7 with an end result of 3.3.

The formula for standing increase is

[math] \text{ New standing} = \text{Old standing} + ( 10 - \text{Old standing} ) \times \text{Standing increase} [/math]

The formula for standing decrease is almost same, just towards -10

[math] \text{ New standing} = \text{Old standing} + ( -10 - \text{Old standing} ) \times \text{Standing decrease} [/math]

where Standing decrease is the decimal form of standing change. For example 0.4% would be 0.004.

The consequence of this math is that the higher your standings are, the less effective standings increases become and the more dramatic penalties become. For example a standing loss of 1% turns 9.0 standing into 8.81 but increase of 1% would bring 9.0 standing to 9.01.

The Ploy

WARNING: Below guide is currently only theoretical, it was not tested. Test is currently in progress, but it will take a while to finish. Follow at your own risk

"The Ploy" is detailed plan how to get to 5.0 standings. This is the fastest way I've found - and has specific requirements:

• Total standings (unmodified) for all 4 faction is higher than 8.1 (if your main faction is Gallente or Minmatar) or 7.6 (for Caldari or Amarr)
• Social and Connection skills are trained to V - Social has to be done before starting, Connections can be trained later - it's needed for 2 first Epic arcs, so it's recommended to train it to V before starting
• At least 2 Career agents from each faction are available to run - if that's not possible, other means can be used, but with significant drawbacks
• Capability to run empire Epic Arcs - in terms of ship/skills
• Main faction chosen - faction for which you have the best standings (or the worst standings for it's enemy)

Step 1. Adjusting standings

To be able to start this plan, you need standings set in following way:

• If your main faction is Gallente:
  

Gallente - 3.20
Caldari - 1.20
Minmatar - 3.20
Amarr - 0.50

• If your main faction is Minmatar:
  

Gallente - 3.20
Caldari - 0.00
Minmatar - 3.20
Amarr - 1.70

• If your main faction is Amarr:
  

Gallente - 0.80
Caldari - 3.50
Minmatar - -0.50
Amarr - 3.80

• If your main faction is Caldari:
  

Gallente - -0.50
Caldari - 3.50
Minmatar - 0.80
Amarr - 3.80

This is minimum required to follow. Differences between main faction and required standings are result of asymmetrical standings gains modifiers between Amarr and Caldari. It's way easier to grind standings now, than to try fix it later. If you're stuck in place where on faction is too low, you can run COSMOS missions or datacenters or more storylines to make it up. If you start with standings below these, you will not be able to finish it - keep that in mind before starting. Since the whole process is long, you might want to run SoE epic arc to fix last faction to required level. Keep in mind that SoE will give you around 0.7 gain if run for enemy faction - so grind it to 1.2 to get required 1.9

If you have required total standings, but they need to be balanced, you can run Storyline/COSMOS/Datacenter missions for faction with lowest standings. COSMOS and Datacenter missions are one-time only - keep in mind that you won't be able to repeat them.

Step 2. Last check

Check if you have Social at V, standings above minimums. For now you should stop running storyline missions - they will mess up this plan

Step 3. Career agents

Run all 8 Career agent chains, in following order:

• Major enemy
  
• Minor enemy
  
• Major enemy
  
• Minor enemy
  
• Chosen faction
  
• Friendly faction
  
• Chosen faction
  
• Friendly faction
  

Alternatively, you can copy this sheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1XqJqgMUvu9oWGj5YkK03x2AR0VQ5LQ0AaLevpzAWfzg/edit?usp=sharing , leave only your faction path, and put your standings - and then follow plan described there.
The main point if this part of The Ploy is to get both friendly empires to 4.0 standing (to be able to run Epic Arcs) and keep both enemy factions at correct level, which will be required later. If your total standings are above 11.2 and both friendly faction are at 4.01, you can skip some Career agents - keep in mind that you should be sure that you have all standings above required minimum for next step.

Step 4. Epic Arcs

With 3.81 you have 2 Epic arcs unlocked - run them both, picking standings reward (Minmatar!). This will push friendly empires to 4.75 - which allows us to lower them to 3.80 in next step, while gaining standings for 2 enemy factions.

Step 5. Rebalancing

This is the tedious step. Right now storyline missions give very small net standings gains, they only shift them around. What you need to achieve are following standings:

Chosen faction - 3.81
Friendly faction - 3.81
Major enemy - 3.00
Minor enemy - 2.30

To get to that point, you need to run 7 Storyline missions with 1% reward - this translates to XXX L2 distro storylines, which are the fastest to farm. Simply run L2 distro missions for Major and Minor enemy factions, either swapping them every couple of missions, or start with Major enemy and run it until Chosen faction drops to 3.96. If you choose corps required for Step 6 - it will shorten whole process

With this step 2 faction are complete - at 3.81 unmodified, you have effective 5.05 with Connections V

Step 6. Last two

This step might take the longest. To Close the gap for two remaining factions, you need:

• Major enemy - run faction Epic Arc
• Minor enemy - run faction Epic Arc, then SoE Epic Arc - the order is important if you started with minimum standings!

Step 7. Deviations from The Ploy

If needed, whole plan can be adjusted to suit your needs. Two possible adjustments:

• Step 3 - If your initial standings are higher that minimum required

You can skip some Career agents (they are very useful for Step 5 if available) - but keep in mind that you still need to achieve desired results after Step 3, which are available in https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1XqJqgMUvu9oWGj5YkK03x2AR0VQ5LQ0AaLevpzAWfzg/edit?usp=sharing . Due to asymmetrical standings modifiers these requirements are different depending on Friendly/Enemy faction chosen. Having wrong requirements after Step 3 might delay whole process by 90-180 days, needed for next run of Epic Arcs. In provided sheet all milestones are marked with green color - if you reached milestone early, you can move to next section of plan.

• Step 5 - If your standings are higher, or other means of standings gain are available

You can skip some Storyline missions and replace them with Career agents, COSMOS or Datacenters - again, important thing is to achieve desired results. For all starting factions it's 3.81 with two friendly factions and 2.3 and 3.0 with enemy factions. With initially high standings it's also possbile to achieve 3.0 with both enemy factions, which skips one SoE Epic arc. If 3.0 and 3.2 is achieved with enemy factions, one faction Epic Arc can be changed to SoE Epic Arc, which is significantly easier, but offers less rewards.

Proof of concept

In this section I will describe my run, together with skips I did, and time needed to finish complete Ploy. Keep in mind that my starting point might be higher than yours - this has the most impact on difficulty/time needed to complete it.

Starting situation

My initial standings were:

Gallente: 3.89
Caldari: 0.79
Minmatar: 4.10
Amarr: 0.69

These standings are a result of 2 SoE Epic Arcs and 175 Storyline missions of various levels - but when I started playing I also lost quite a lot of standings due to my lack of knowledge about missions against empires.

Since Gallente and Minmatar are similar, as are Caldari and Amarr, I have a choice of path - both Gallente and Minmatar are equally feasible. Since from Amarr I had 3 Career agents, and from Caldari only 2, I decided to run Amarr Career agent to get to starting point in Gallente Path - I needed to push Caldari to 1.2. I could try pushing Amarr to 1.7 instead, but that's not possible with only one Career agent. Since I want to start as soon as I can - Gallente path it is.

After 4.5h I've finished 3 agents (Military, Advanced Military and Exploration) in my new T3D, then for business agent I had to switch to Coercer for some missions. Finishing all Amarr agents took in total XXh, which resulted in following standings (minimum required for Gallente path in brackets):

Gallente: 3.65 [3.20]
Caldari: 1.36 [1.2]
Minmatar: 3.47 [3.2]
Amarr: 1.50 [0.5]

FIN?